Category: Social Justice

The post originally appeared on Cleveland.com and was submitted by Chad Griffin, President of HRC, and William Hardy, President and CEO of Equitas Health. For millions of Americans across the country, the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act is a terrifying prospect. People are facing dire consequences if President Donald Trump succeeds in his quest to destroy…

Senate Health Care Bill would be Devastation for Millions. Medicaid would be taken from a program that guarantees needed health care into one that caps spending, where care is compromised and people die, or not. It is catastrophe for women, children, and low-income Americans, the disables, the addicted, those in nursing homes and others. It would repeal the taxes levied on the wealthy and it would drastically reshape Medicaid, a program that one in five Americans depend on for life-saving care, from two-thirds of those in nursing homes whose care is covered by Medicaid to the one in every two babies born to Medicaid recipients. Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood would be cut off for one year (it a way to defund Planned Parenthood). It still ends the healthcare mandate that every American be insured. It still gives power to the states to drop many of the essential benefits required by the ACA, including maternity care, emergency services, substance abuse, and mental healthcare treatments. It still ends the Medicaid expansion that helped 20 million people get insured (although one year later than the House proposed). And it places a cap on Medicaid, while simultaneously cutting about $840 billion from the entitlement program over the next 10 years to pay for enormous tax cuts for the wealthy. All of which adds up to very terrible news for patients, but especially the 2.5 million Americans currently struggling with an opioid addiction.

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released figures showing that 22 million people would lose their health insurance and that premiums and deductibles would rise, making health care more expensive for millions of Americans.

“This CBO score confirms what we already knew, which is the Senate’s health care bill would be a Devastation for the American people. Health care remains unaffordable for so many individuals, yet their plan would result in skyrocketing deductibles and premiums, making it even harder to obtain good quality coverage. Dropping and removing 22 million individuals off their insurance plans and implementing a discriminatory age tax will not solve the problem either.

“The Senate’s AHCA is no health care bill, it’s the equivalent of a death sentence for countless everyday Americans. Millions of others who will not get to a doctor when they must will get extremely sick, losing their jobs, their homes, and their way of life.